December 4, 2010

December 4th: Nicole Mauro

Going Rogue
(When I Heard the Song of What I See)by Sarah Palin, Emily Dickinson, and Nicole Mauro

Then, a trap.

The black-suited, laptop-toting condom-wearing bananas who said they began as single-celled organisms that developed into monkeys who eventually swung from the trees came to me with stories, stories about duplicating creatures—mammoths with horns boinging not out of fjords, but beekers. On the continent of Iceland. Right in front of Scotland and the Chinese.

My face sliding off in the sunshine. Despite, the world vision of Cashmere I confidently see…

…the insects pass, but then they’re telling me that my pupils are small houseflies in the grass, and that these insects’ ancestors have always been trapped. In amberrock—like me. And then they’re telling me that the amberrock we’re all trapped in is from BC. And then they’re telling me that these insects in amberrock from BC are from what sprang my son Track. And you. And me. And then I said Nah, Earth’s bits of little blackness are just places where the whites of our eyes have rolled back. It’s like the condom has tightened, you see. It’s like there are two kinds of Summer’s Army—the one in California is a cluster of pansies, or scrub on the alluvial plane; the other in Fallujah is the one where bittervetch seed sticks to the buttstock of an M-16.

Same difference, I know. Both are situations—one is crunchy green, and the other a mass in Asia Minor flowergrow.

Sing with closed lips, migrant/soldier. Whose feet know the flat earth, despite its other eye, the round world—whose bits come in bundles, in parcels, in blow-apart batches. Lest anybody spy the blood. There are not enough traps for the houseflies. Nor houses, for that matter.

Nicole Mauro’s poems and criticism have appeared in publications such as Jacket, How2, Western Humanities Review, and absent, among others. She is the author of six chapbooks, one full-length poetry collection, The Contortions (Dusie Books, 2009), and her second book, Tax-Dollar Super-Sonnet Featuring Sarah Palin as Poet, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in 2011. She is the co-editor of an interdisciplinary book about sidewalks titled Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Space (with Marci Nelligan, ChainArts, 2008). She lives in the San Francisco bay area with her husband Patrick, and daughters Nina and Faye, where she teaches rhetoric and language at the University of San Francisco.

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ORIGIN STORY: It was 2006. Some of us wished the women poets we admired would write more about poetry and poetics, experimental, post-avant. Some of them weren’t writing about these things at all. Why not? They’re busy, some of us surmised. Some of them were writing about these things, but some of us were greedy, and wanted them to write more. Some of them were men, and some of us wanted some of them to write about experimental women poets, gender performativity on the page, masculinity via grotesque, etc. Wanted some of them to write about some of these things more/at all.

What if some of us built a platform? What if the parameters were informal, relatively boundless? What if the form invited conversation and huzzah?

But some of us are busy, too. Some of us can’t possibly fit one more dish on our plates, and some of us can’t possibly spin one more plate in the air, and some of us can’t possibly...

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